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5 hinin (outcaste)
The result of expulsion from, or lack of integration into established residential groups was a status known as hinin. Even earlier than the Tokugawa era in Japan, there were persons and groups who were so out-casted. The reasons given for this practice are many and their margins fuzzy. Neary (1989) notes that an occupational1 stigma (based on Buddhist notions of defilement) surrounding the handling of bodies or excrement of animals or humans was one feature of these areas.
Other groups, such as those who had been captured during conquests of outlying regions, or itinerant entertainers, filled a marginal zone of quasi outcaste status. But it was only when the land itself was measured and its tenure noted that the means of escaping this stigma became problematic. It was through the controls placed on residence and movement across the land that those who had no could were trapped by their lack of property.
Hinin were also workers in the penal system, from guarding prisoners to disposing of their beheaded corpses. And beggers, who were required to register during Tokugawa times (De Vos, 26), filled a liminal stage between ryoumin (good people) and senmin (lowly people).
The spatial availability of buraku as receptacles of those who had lost their residences through shunning or through economic reversals in the early decades of the agricultural market economy facilitated the production of such homeless people, by removing them from the locales they formerly occupied. These burakus, many of which are still maintained through a combination of official inattention, bureaucratic marking, and (unofficial) social stigma, are the spatial outcome of the confluence of economic inequality under early capitalism and social/political controls levied directly or by proxy by the Tokugawa bakufu government.
1Other occupations with less-obviously Buddhist-related stigmas (such as bamboo manufacture and indigo dying) also carried a stigma. These may have been occupations that required little capital or land, and were simply available to persons with little means, and so were marked by their lack of entry-controls.
